The payoff for this story wasn’t quite as powerful as I expected. There are curious blanks and jokes that lead nowhere. The magic ring that allows Zach to summon the demon attached to it also allows the wearer to converse with animals. However, the animal-talking bit isn’t played up much. Except for a few slightly humorous instances involving a hot-dog-yearning canine and insanely greedy seagulls, that aspect of the ring is almost completely abandoned. In fact, it’s snatched away from Zach partway through the novel and replaced by another magical artefact—as if the ring never mattered at all.
The bad guys turn out to be plasticky suburbanites with toupees, khaki and too much Botox. Lacking the funereal majesty you’d expect of an apocalyptic fanatical secret order jonesing for the end of the world, they disappoint Zach and the reader alike. The human characters with the most personality turn out to be Zach, his adolescent contemporaries and his annoying little sister Naomi.
Zach’s parents and grandparents make a token appearance and there’s some friction there. But they’re adults and, as such, get short shrift in the main storyline. The attempts by the well-off grandmother to convert her grandkids to Christianity are rendered trivial and nonexistent after one chapter.
Zach’s association with Ashmedei seems to consist mainly of having the demon stuff his face and occasionally rescue Zach from dangerous situations. Ash’s behavior vacillates unpredictably from morose introspection to gleeful mayhem. What is intriguing about him is that he’s not actively evil. The notion of good and evil is different in the Talmudic religion and the book does touch on that. However, Zach’s family isn’t particularly religious so his interest in that part of his life is glancing at best.
Zach is gay, too, but he’s still in the closet to everybody except his closest friend. So that has little or no impact on the story. He’s all a-flutter about a certain boy but his interactions with him are even more negligible than his chats with animals. If his homosexuality had led to a tendresse with Ashmedei, that would have been a very interesting development.
This book is aimed at the tween set so its lackluster performance may not be as apparent to them. Older readers may want to pass over this book for more engrossing fare.
The bad guys turn out to be plasticky suburbanites with toupees, khaki and too much Botox. Lacking the funereal majesty you’d expect of an apocalyptic fanatical secret order jonesing for the end of the world, they disappoint Zach and the reader alike. The human characters with the most personality turn out to be Zach, his adolescent contemporaries and his annoying little sister Naomi.
Zach’s parents and grandparents make a token appearance and there’s some friction there. But they’re adults and, as such, get short shrift in the main storyline. The attempts by the well-off grandmother to convert her grandkids to Christianity are rendered trivial and nonexistent after one chapter.
Zach’s association with Ashmedei seems to consist mainly of having the demon stuff his face and occasionally rescue Zach from dangerous situations. Ash’s behavior vacillates unpredictably from morose introspection to gleeful mayhem. What is intriguing about him is that he’s not actively evil. The notion of good and evil is different in the Talmudic religion and the book does touch on that. However, Zach’s family isn’t particularly religious so his interest in that part of his life is glancing at best.
Zach is gay, too, but he’s still in the closet to everybody except his closest friend. So that has little or no impact on the story. He’s all a-flutter about a certain boy but his interactions with him are even more negligible than his chats with animals. If his homosexuality had led to a tendresse with Ashmedei, that would have been a very interesting development.
This book is aimed at the tween set so its lackluster performance may not be as apparent to them. Older readers may want to pass over this book for more engrossing fare.